Tree story contest winner!

Thank you to all the creative writers who entered Living With Nature's "Tree story contest." In observance of Arbor Day, it's time to critique the eligible entries and announce the winner!

The closing of themestream, the website, on April 13 presented several problems for this contest. First of all, most of the rules for this contest were posted in an article there. However, the deadline for entries was April 18, so this situation only closed the contest five days early.

More unfortunate was that several themestream articles had been submitted as entries and were no longer accessible. I endeavoured to contact these participants and ask them to repost in the contest discussion forum. However, in the confusion I missed contacting all of them and not all who received my request reposted properly.

In the end, I had to judge and select the winner from those entries which I could view on the Web. As it happens, all of them are in the discussion forum, so you won't have to go far to read them.

In the original Themestream "Tree story challenge," I said the entries should tell "the story of a tree that has affected your life," and that the theme was the "spiritual and personal nature of trees." For more about this, you may read the previous article here, "Trees we have known." Each entry was to be an original essay or poem, not fiction, of 300 to 400 words.

To judge, each entry was awarded points based on how well it fell within these guidelines. Points were also awarded based on three criteria I said I would look for:

1. Descriptive poetry or prose. Good nature writing observes and then reflects.
2. A sense of uniqueness, spirit or personality of the tree and what benefit it bestowed.
3. I'm not a stickler for spelling or grammar, but the winning entry won't be one that gives us too much to stumble over.

So here is a critique of the contest entries in the order they were submitted to the forum. I have given some strengths of each one, along with ways in which the entry might have been improved.

"The sentry" by Celtic Dawn:

I liked the way the writer presented her own change of heart towards this tree, from "I secretly thought, you...broke the line of the garden," to "Realized that you were the living, breathing heartbeat of this place." There were good descriptive phrases like "sweet resin rise," "knots and holes," and "shapes you made against the moon." There is not a lot to criticize about this one. It is slightly more than 400 words. It lapsed unnecessarily into the present tense in the last two lines of the third stanza.

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